Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Truth and narrative...

Who Killed Boris Nemtsov? Things have shaken out predictably: The mainstreamers scream "Putin diddit!" without bothering with evidence, while the non-mainstreamers scream "False flag!" without bothering with evidence. Justin Raimondo argues that evidence -- not narrative, not weltanschauung -- is what truly counts.

Funny how political murders in the US – the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King – are invariably the work of a “lone nut,” but in Russia it’s always the Putin government...

Yet even Putin’s enemies, with some alarm, are now throwing doubt on the West’s conventional wisdom.

Speaking of the murder, Irina Khakamada, who co-founded with Nemtsov the opposition Solidarity Party, while blaming "the climate of intimidation," also warned that "the murder could herald a dangerous destabilization," according to Talking Points Memo. "It’s a provocation that is clearly not in Putin’s interests, it’s aimed at rocking the situation."

Putin eerily predicted this possibility in a comment made three years ago when he suggested that his enemies were not above murdering a prominent opposition figure so they could blame it on him.

The truth is likely a bit more prosaic.

Nemtsov’s enemies were legion: aside from Putin and his supporters, there are the more extreme nationalists who think Putin is a sell-out. Nemtsov’s open support for the Ukrainian government against his own country generated the kind of hatred antiwar activists had to endure during the Vietnam war: think Jane Fonda upon her return from Hanoi. Perhaps a bit more lethal are the oligarchs threatened by Nemtsov’s reform program – a series of "anti-corruption" measures ultimately aborted by his mentor, Boris Yeltsin.

There's a lot more on the other end of that link. I've not always been a Raimondo fan, but this is damned good writing. He ends the piece on this important note:

Putin is no angel, but if you want to see devils just look at his probable successors – no, not the Putinists, none of whom have the stature to measure up to the original, but the outright fascists and ultra-nationalists who will take full advantage of Washington’s open hostility. Add to this the fact that Russia, while nowhere near the power it once was, yet retains its nuclear arsenal, and you have all the makings of a global calamity in progress.

Google as arbiter of truth. Google previously would rank a website based on links, but now they will give a site top ranking if it tells "the truth" -- as Google defines truth. The example given involves anti-vaccination campaigners, whose sites supposedly outrank pro-vaccination websites. (Actually, that's not true.)

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

Insert standard Orwell reference here.

The vaccination thing is just a gimmick, a false issue designed to make the new system look reasonable. These people are motivated by other concerns. They want to rewrite history -- to rewrite reality itself -- without appearing to be censors.

I immediately flashed on the JFK assassination. Twenty years ago, all major newspapers routinely referred to Oswald as the "accused assassin" or the "presumed assassin." Now he is called the assassin, with no caveats. That's an important change, and it wasn't brought about by any new evidence. (All the new evidence has gone in the other direction.) Newsweek published a cover story which grandly announced that only three bullets were fired in Dealey Plaza. Newsweek refused to mention that the author of that story, Max Holland, has undeniable links to the CIA. Newsweek also did not mention that no less an authority than J. Edgar Hoover refused to go along with the "three bullets" fable.

I wrote the preceding paragraph to ask you people one question: Do you think that Google's Knowledge Vault -- a.k.a., the Ministry of Truth -- will allow any front-page links to websites such as CTKA (which has experienced a surprising readership growth)?

To cite a more recent example: Do you think that the new Ministry of Truth will allow any front-page links to stories about the true origins of the Ukraine crisis?

If we google the words "CIA funded Google" will the new Ministry of Truth allow us to see the truth?

"I, for one, welcome our new Israeli overlords!" You gotta read this one. At least read the headline. I always enjoy it when the True Power decides to stop operating behind the scenes: "Here I am! Deal with me!" The honesty is refreshing.

It has become very clear that Bibi wants us to wage war on Iran on Israel's behalf. And he will do anything -- anything -- to get that war.

So what is with Obama? There are signs that the puppet is snapping his strings, and I honestly don't think he wants to fight Bibi's war. (Or rather, another one of Bibi's wars.) Intelligence sharing has been ramped down. I believe that Obama personally engineered the leak of the Mossad report indicating that Iran has no nuclear program, contradicting Bibi's Big Lie to the UN.

The most important point here is sub-textual: If the NYT has turned against Hillary Clinton, then we should suspect that she has privately revealed to her closest aides that, if elected, she will do things that she cannot now state out loud. Of course, nothing is truly private these days.

It's worth noting that the hacker Guccifer -- best known for revealing Dubya's paintings, which he obviously wanted the world to know about anyways -- targeted the private emails between Hillary and Sidney Blumenthal. News accounts always fail to mention the fact that Sidney is the father of the courageous Max Blumenthal, who has become Israel's most important American critic.

Something is there. I'm not sure what. But it's...something.

The Clintons' relationship to the Blumenthal family is one of the reasons why I'm starting to re-warm to the idea of a Hillary presidency.

Raimondo is a Libertarian, so it's no surprise that a lot of us here would agree with his take on foreign policy much of the time. I used to read him pretty regularly, but got a bit tired of the hard core libertarians dominating the comment section......as well as Raimondo's own occasional views on fiscal policy. Still though, he's very on the ball and mostly right when it comes to his foreign policy analysis.

I wouldn't get to interested in Clinton. She's Washington D.C. through and through. Not a good thing. She'll do whatever she has to to secure the office, then start turning in favors faster than you can say "unfulfilled campaign promise".

posted by Gus : 9:33 AM

An interesting profile of Nemtsov by Mark Ames. It seems Nemtsov was a corrupt anti-corruption campaigner and helped to place Putin in a position to be Yeltsin's successor. Was his transformation into a Putin critic merely the result of being cut out of the action? This is not the standard heroic and sainted profile presented in the western media.

Looking at the Russia Times' e-mails from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary, he provides a lot of what appear to be intelligence reports on Libya from "sensitive sources". On the assumption that he wasn't in a position to collect this information himself, it would seem that he was simply cutting and pasting excerpts from official intelligence reports collected by some other agency and forwarding them to Hillary via an unclassified, unencrypted e-mail account that would surely be targeted by, and vulnerable to, any number of countries' intelligence services, thus putting the sources and methods at risk.

If this was the case, then totally aside from Hillary's effort to avoid political accountability, both she and Blumenthal would appear to be misusing sensitive classified information in a very serious way. Any other government employee who did such a thing would be looking at some serious prison time.

posted by Anonymous : 11:30 AM

I've been playing whack-a-mole wth Lone Nutters all week, ever since you and I helped spread the word about O'Reilly's lie regarding the George DeMohrenschildt suicide. For days, the very visible "Huffington Post" referred to GDM as a friend to "the assassin" of John F. Kennedy. While watching Rachel Maddow cover the story, I actually tweeted a 3-2-1 countdown to the moment when she would inevitably call Oswald "the assassin." Sure enough, she did. I wrote to both the Huffington Post and Maddow, and I told them that the legal and journalistic standard for an unconvicted person is to use the word "alleged" or "accused." And bless their hearts, at least one person at HuffPo got the memo, because yesterday they had a reference to Oswald as the "alleged" assassin. Hell, it evens says "alleged" on the plague at the Texas Schoolbook Depository! (But alas, at Tenth and Patton, the plaque from the Texas Historical Society identifies the interesectkon as the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald "murdered" J.D. Tippit. For this and countless other reasons, I pity future generations.

The progressive wing of the democrat party is beginning to voice their concern troll mentality towards Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton's Foundation because they want Elizabeth Warren to run. Gus's comment is an example of a concern troll progressive warning us about snowball, er Hillary Clinton.While the progressive wing is the most powerful wing in the democrat party, it does not have the numbers when compared to the moderates in the democrat party and then throw in the republican moderates who are fine with Hillary Clinton and it is an uphill battle, but one they won in 2008 by getting Barack Obama past Hillary Clinton.It's going to take both the neocons and the progressives working together to label snowball, er Hillary Clinton a polarizing influence so each of these two insane radical components of both parties can lasso in their larger moderate members from their own party.

Alessandro, I am not a "progressive" in any sense of the word, nor am I even a Democrat. Further, I am not "concern trolling" as I really don't care who anyone votes for since the whole thing is likely rigged anyway. I do still vote, however, just in case I'm wrong (not afraid of that, like so many people seem to be nowadays). I warn about Hillary because there are many, many damn good reasons to warn people. Joseph has much more lenience towards her than I do, and that is fine. I'd certainly rather have her in office than any of the Republicans who have made their intentions to run known. If she ends up being the one on the ballot, I will most likely vote for her, just to spare us from whatever ignorant Republican clown gets the nomination. However, that doesn't make Hillary a good choice. Her stint as secretary of state is all I needed to consider her a lost cause.